The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,66
scar like a bandolier across his chest. Missing a few fingers, too. That didn’t matter to Rowenda. She used to dress up in disguise—I doubt it fooled anybody but her, but once a week or so she’d put on a tattered cloak and wear a veil and come spend a half dour with Merick in the back of his tent.”
Kayan said, “Is there a point to this tender reminiscence?”
Nodding slowly, Jedra said, “She got some kind of thrill out of it. Merick did, too, but he didn’t realize what was going on. He thought she really cared for him, right up to the day she grew tired of him and had him hauled off to the slave pens.”
Kayan squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them, they seemed to glisten with fire. “You think I’m slumming, is that it?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Jedra said. “The important thing is whether or notion think you’re slumming.”
She didn’t respond for a long time, merely let the book thump to the floor and lay back on the cushion, one hand over her eyes. After a long moment in which the only noise was the faint whistling of the wind flowing around the outside of the camouflaged house, she said, “I don’t need this right now. Not on top of everything else.”
“I don’t either,” said Jedra, “but something isn’t right between us, and it’s driving me nuts. At first I thought it was just jealousy because I could do telekinesis and you couldn’t, but now I don’t know. Jealousy I can handle, but if you think I’m not good enough for you, if I’m eventually going to be rejected because I can’t read or I’ve got bad table manners or something, then I don’t see any point in prolonging the agony.”
She raised her hand off her eyes. “Jedra, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I hope I don’t,” he said, but his stomach felt tied in knots. She hadn’t denied what he’d said.
Unwilling to push it any further, he left her alone with her book. Kitarak was in his workshop, building some unfathomable piece of tinkercraft, so Jedra went back to his and Kayan’s room and sat cross-legged on the cushion there. He tried to clear his mind and just relax for a few minutes, but the harder he tried, the more frustrated he became. He couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was in the room with him. He wondered if Kayan or Kitarak were trying to read his mind, but he knew from experience what that felt like, and this wasn’t the same. This was something else, something less directed, something…
Something in the knapsack he had carried with him all through the desert. He levitated it off the hook by the door and brought it to his lap, where he opened it up to find the crystals he had taken from the ruined city.
He had forgotten all about them in the turmoil of fatigue and emotion since he had arrived here. The one he wore on the thong around his neck had become such a familiar companion that he no longer noticed it, but now he took the other two—the ones with the strange presence to them—out of the pack and held them in his hand. He concentrated on them, trying to sense what kind of energy they might contain that made them register like living beings, but they didn’t respond to his mental probes. He tried every method Kitarak had taught him, but nothing told him any more than he already knew.
He stood up and carried the crystals through the kitchen into the workshop, where he found Kitarak bent over a tiny geared device of some sort. The tohr-kreen looked up when he entered. “Yes?”
“I just remembered these crystals,” Jedra said, extending his hand. “They’ve got some odd kind of presence to them, but I can’t figure out what. I thought maybe you could.”
Kitarak glanced at them. “Ah, those. I told you before, they’re probably just magical talismans. Either that or they’re empowered gems used for storing psionic energy.” He clicked his mouth in laughter. “Given what you and Kayan are capable of together, you certainly don’t need anything like that.” He turned back to the device on his workbench. “Look here!” he said proudly. “I have nearly repaired this clock. I need only make one more gear, and I believe it will run.”
Kitarak obviously wasn’t interested in Jedra’s crystals. Jedra looked at the tohr-kreen’s tiny nest of overlapping wheels with